The Defense Department is continuing its push to reduce human thought and human action to a few lines of code. The latest effort comes from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, which is looking to build “mathematical or computational models of human attention, memory, categorization, reasoning, problem solving, learning and motivation, and decision making.” […]

It’s summertime and the Terminator is back. A sci-fi movie thrill ride, “Terminator Salvation” comes complete with a malevolent artificial intelligence dubbed Skynet, a military R.&D. project that gained self-awareness and concluded that humans were an irritant — perhaps a bit like athlete’s foot — to be dispatched forthwith. The notion that a self-aware computing […]

Sapphire crystals may be the next material to transform the electronics industry, thanks to nanotechnology researchers who have announced a new way of storing data that would fit the contents of 250 DVDs on a coin-sized surface. The study, published in Science, illustrates how nanoscale elements can organize themselves over a large sheet of semiconductor […]

The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before. The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards […]

New research from Monash University bee researcher Adrian Dyer could lead to improved artificial intelligence systems and computer programs for facial recognition. Dr Dyer is one of Australia’s leading bee experts and his latest research shows that honeybees can learn to recognise human faces even when seen from different viewpoints. Dr Dyer said the research […]

Yes, if we play our cards right – or wrong, depending on your perspective. In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the internet’s complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall and transmit information. “The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind,” says Ben […]

Elon Musk just got biblical on the topic of artificial intelligence. In fact, he called it “our biggest existential threat”. This from a man working hard to make it possible for you to take a snooze behind the wheel during your morning commute. “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,” the Tesla TSLA, +0.14% […]

The human brain is the world’s most sophisticated computer, capable of learning new things on the fly, using very little data. It can recognize objects, understand speech, respond to change. Since the early days of digital technology, scientists have worked to build computers that were more like the three-pound organ inside your head. Most efforts […]

One second is here and gone before most of us can think about it. But a delay of one second can seem like an eternity in a quantum computer capable of running calculations in millionths of a second. That’s why engineers at D-Wave Systems worked hard to eliminate the one-second computing delay that existed in […]